Finally! Some Medical Schools are Getting that Food = Medicine

Here at One Green Planet, we have questioned why in the world U.S. medical students receive less than 20 contact hours of nutritional training, when good nutrition has been proved to be such a key element in the prevention of many conditions and diseases.

Well, it seems medical schools, or at least one of them, may have at long last gotten the message. The Tulane University School of Medicine has added a “culinary medicine” course to its curriculum. According to Treehugger,  the course is the first of its kind in the country, and seeks to ” improve doctors’ nutritional knowledge and encourage them to use food to prevent or cure illnesses.”

Deemed the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, the new Tulane facility and class will also have medical students teaching what they learn about food and its prep to local New Orleans residents via free cooking classes in its teaching kitchen. And, the move already appears to be spreading: “Fortunately, the culinary medicine model seems to be catching on. Already two other medical schools have licensed the curriculum and are adding it to their courses,” reports Treehugger.

We’re betting nutrition experts around the country are rejoicing in this news. Katherine Chauncey, a registered dietitian and professor of clinical family medicine at Texas Tech University, says: “You can’t just keep writing out script after script after script of new medications when diet is just as important as drugs or any other treatment a patient may be using.”

We’d love to see this sort of center and course spread to all U.S. medical programs as soon as possible, so we can help our medical professional shift to a smarter model of prevention over treatment, with good nutrition at its core!

Image source: Peggy Greb / Wikimedia Commons